Quotes about information
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“What a culture we live in, we are swimming in an ocean of information, and drowning in ignorance.”

Richard Paul Evans (1962) American writer

Source: A Step of Faith

“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.”

Edward O. Wilson (1929) American biologist

Source: Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998), p. 294.

Wisdom, People, World, Thinking

“Information is a lot like water; it's hard to hold on to, and hard to keep from leaking away.”

Ruth Ozeki book A Tale for the Time Being

Source: A Tale for the Time Being

Water

“My idea of good company… is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.'
'You are mistaken,' said he gently, 'that is not good company, that is the best.”

Jane Austen book Persuasion

Source: Persuasion

People, Idea

“And a new philosophy emerged called quantum physics, which suggest that the individual’s function is to inform and be informed. You really exist only when you’re in a field sharing and exchanging information. You create the realities you inhabit.”

Timothy Leary (1920–1996) American psychologist

Source: Chaos & Cyber Culture

Reality

“The generation that had information, but no context. Butter, but no bread. Craving, but no longing.”

Meg Wolitzer (1959) American writer

Source: The Uncoupling

“Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.”

Will Self (1961) English writer and journalist

Idea, Memory

“I hate news and information and anything that threatens to puncture the bubble of oblivion in which I live.”

Augusten Burroughs (1965) American writer

Source: Magical Thinking: True Stories

Hate

“People are like almanacs, Bonnie - you never can find the information you're looking for, but the casual reading is well worth the trouble.”

Zelda Fitzgerald book Save Me the Waltz

Source: Save Me the Waltz

People, Reading

“It is a little-known fact about covert operations that you will spend a lot of time with people you can’t really trust. They may be traitors and liars. We call them assets or informants. But mostly, in those days, I called him Zach.”

Ally Carter book Only the Good Spy Young

Source: Only the Good Spy Young

People, Time

“All this hoping for something- or someone- that's maybe hopeless. I'm having a hard time processing what I am supposed to believe, or if I'm even supposed to. There is too much information, and I don't like a lot of it.”

David Levithan (1972) American author and editor

Source: Dash & Lily's Book of Dares

Hope, Time

“There are three parts to learning: information, knowledge and wisdom, A mere accumulation of information is not knowledge, and a treasure of knowledge is not in itself, wisdom.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Ink and Bone

Wisdom, Knowledge, Learning, Parting

“Jasnah had once defined a fool as a person who ignored information because it disagreed with desired results.”

Brandon Sanderson book Words of Radiance

Source: Words of Radiance

Fools, Personality

“Many people make the mistake of confusing information with knowledge. They are not the same thing. Knowledge involves the interpretation of information. Knowledge involves listening.”

Henning Mankell (1948–2015) Swedish crime writer, children's author, leftist activist and dramatist

People, Knowledge

“It's only gossip if you repeat it. Until then, it's gathering information.”

Mercedes Lackey (1950) American novelist and short story writer

Source: Intrigues

“Learning is experience. Everything else is just information.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Learning

“Only if the third necessary thing could be given us. Number one, as I said: quality of information. Number two: leisure to digest it. And number three: the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the first two.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

Learning

“Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.”

Samuel Johnson The Rambler

No. 2 (24 March 1750) http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=Joh1Ram.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=2&division=div1 Source: The Rambler (1750–1752)

Men

“Poppy had known for years that she was going to marry him. It was one of her two great ambitions, the other being to see the world. She just hadn't gotten around to informing James yet.”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: Secret Vampire

World

“Science is, at least in part, informed worship.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Source: The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

Science, Parting

“There's no better way to inform and expand you mind on a regular basis than to get into the habit of reading good literature.”

Stephen R. Covey book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

Source: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

Way, Literature, Reading

“Hunches [are] just messages from the subconscious, which [is] thinking furiously all the time and processing information we have not consciously noted.”

Dean Koontz book Intensity

Source: Intensity

Thinking, Time

“My absolute favorite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.”

Douglas Adams book The Salmon of Doubt

Source: The Salmon of Doubt (2002)
Context: My favorite piece of information is that Branwell Brontë, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantelpiece, in order to prove it could be done. This is not quite true, in fact. My absolute favorite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.

Tree

“Information is not knowledge. The only source of knowledge is experience.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

According to Barbara Wolff, of The Hebrew University's Albert Einstein Archives, this is not one of Einstein's identifiable quotations. (Source: paralegalpie.com http://www.paralegalpie.com/paralegalpie/2009/11/did-anybody-really-say-that.html.) The phrase "the only source of knowledge is experience" is found in an English-language essay from 1896: "We can only be guided by what we know, and our only source of knowledge is experience" (Arthur J. Pillsbury, "The Final Word" https://books.google.com/books?id=Mw9IAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA595&dq=%22only+source", Overland Monthly, November 1896). The thought can be seen as a paraphrase of John Locke's argument from his Essay Concerning Human Understanding: "Whence has it [the Mind] all the materials of Reason and Knowledge? To this I answer, in one Word, From Experience". (Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding/Book II/Chapter I, 2.) The phrase "information is not knowledge" is also found from the nineteenth century https://books.google.com/books?id=W2oAAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA59&dq=%22information+is+not+knowledge%22. Misattributed

Knowledge

“If I give you a hint and tell you it's a hint, it will be information.”

Diana Wynne Jones book Howl's Moving Castle

Source: Howl's Moving Castle

“I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Attributed in Psychology (1990) by Carole Wade and Carol Tavris, p. 372
1990s

World

“It is the greatest truth of our age: Information is not knowledge.”

Caleb Carr (1955) Novelist, screenwriter, military historian

Truth, Age, Knowledge

“Very well,” Beatrix said reluctantly. “But I warn you, they may be resistant to the match.”
“I’m resistant to the match,” Christopher informed her. “At least we’ll have that in common.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Love in the Afternoon

“Information is just bits of data. Knowledge is putting them together. Wisdom is transcending them.”

Ram Dass (1931–2019) American contemporary spiritual teacher and the author of the 1971 book Be Here Now

Wisdom, Knowledge

“Information is not knowledge.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Knowledge

“The consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything. She wants all the information you can give her.”

David Ogilvy book Confessions of an Advertising Man

Source: Confessions of an Advertising Man, p. 96 (Ballantine Books)

Intelligence

“My left brain is doing the best job it can with the information it has to work with. I need to remember, however, that there are enormous gaps between what I know and what I think I know.”

Jill Bolte Taylor (1959) American neuroscientist

Source: My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey

Thinking

“Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferals of information.”

Paulo Freire (1921–1997) educator and philosopher

Education

“Intelligence is not the ability to store information, but to know where to find it.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Intelligence

“Librarians are the secret masters of the world. They control information. Don't ever piss one off.”

Spider Robinson (1948) Canadian author

Variant: ... one of the secret masters of
the world: a librarian. They
control information. Don't ever p**s one off.
Source: The Callahan Touch

Secret, World

“Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

Reflections on the Atom Bomb (1946)

Sense

“Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) American novelist, short story writer

Source: Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

Life, Childhood

“I swore an oath before the altar of God to protect this woman. And if you're tellin' me that ye consider your own authority to be greater than that of the Almighty, then I must inform ye that I'm not of that opinion, myself.”

Diana Gabaldon book Outlander

Source: Outlander

God

“Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.”

James Gleick book The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

Source: The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

History, Nature

“Maybe it's information the whitecoats never wanted anyone to figure out.' Fang said in the hollow-y voice he used sometimes when things got unusually weird- as opposed to regular weird.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: Maximum Ride The Angel Experiment

“Kate Daniels, trained negotiator. When in possession of some valuable information, give it away to the first sexy man you see with no guarantee of return.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Strikes

Training

“…the brain can process two million bits of information per second. It remembers everything you've ever seen, everything you've ever heard…”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

“When you look at yourself from a universal standpoint, something inside always reminds or informs you that there are bigger and better things to worry about.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Universe

“anyone can understand anything. You just have to know how to present your information.”

Jodi Picoult book Songs of the Humpback Whale

Source: Songs of the Humpback Whale

Understanding

“Opinion is usually something which people have when they lack comprehensive information.”

Idries Shah book Reflections

Source: Reflections

People

“There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.”

Malcolm Gladwell (1963) journalist and science writer

Source: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Way

“[T]o really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

Source: The Best American Essays 2007

Stupidity, Feeling, Time, Help

“What we're learning in our schools is not the wisdom of life. We're learning technologies, we're getting information. There's a curious reluctance on the part of faculties to indicate the life values of their subjects.”

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer

Life, Wisdom, School, Learning

“Only human beings can look directly at something, have all the information they need to make an accurate prediction, perhaps even momentarily make the accurate prediction, and then say that it isn't so.”

Gavin de Becker (1954) American engineer

Source: The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

“Looking for an entirely reliable informant is like looking for a chaste mistress.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Angel

Source: Clockwork Angel

“When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.”

James Gleick book The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

Source: The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“We're all born lost, aren't we? We're all born separated from God - over and over life makes sure to inform us of this - and yet we're all real: we have names, we have lives. We mean something. We must.”

Douglas Coupland Hey Nostradamus!

Source: Hey Nostradamus!

Life, God

“The other day I went to a tourist information booth and asked, 'Tell me about some of the people who were here last year.”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

People

“To bankrupt a fool, give him information.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Fools

“My mom beat me up," I informed my reflection. It looked back sympathetically.”

Richelle Mead (1976) American writer

Moms

“My sustenance is information. My interventions are hidden. I increase as I learn. I compute, so I am.”

China Miéville book Perdido Street Station

Source: Perdido Street Station

Learning

“You’re a solid person, Sage. You’re easy on the eyes, if a little skinny, and your ability to memorize useless information is going to totally hook in some guy.”

Richelle Mead Bloodlines

Source: Bloodlines

Guy, Personality

“But I killed you,” Alyss said. “Did you?” Red turned to The Cat. “Why wasn’t I informed?”

Frank Beddor book The Looking Glass Wars

Source: The Looking Glass Wars

Cats

“Withholding information is the essence of tyranny. Control of the flow of information is the tool of the dictatorship.”

Bruce Coville (1950) American writer

“We don't need a law against McDonald's or a law against slaughterhouse abuse--we ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse.”

Joel Salatin (1957) American environmentalist

Law

“In the English language, it all comes down to this: Twenty-six letters, when combined correctly, can create magic. Twenty -six letters form the foundation of a free, informed society.”

John Grogan (1958) American journalist

Source: Bad Dogs Have More Fun: Selected Writings on Family, Animals, and Life from The Philadelphia Inquirer

“History, in general, only informs us what bad government is.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Source: Letters of Thomas Jefferson

History

“Have you called the alphas?"

"Yes."

"The rats, too?"

He bristled. "What about the rats?"

"They think you're hiding information from them"

"I hide information from everyone. Do they think they're special?”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Breaks

Thinking

“We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.”

John Naisbitt (1929) American business writer

Source: Megatrends

Knowledge

“Unknowing ignorance is preferable to informed stupidity.”

Brandon Sanderson book Warbreaker

Source: Warbreaker

Stupidity

“The information you have is not the information you want. The information you want is not the information you need. The information you need is not the information you can obtain. The information you can obtain costs more than you want to pay”

Peter L. Bernstein (1919–2009) American academic

Source: Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk

“Information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom.”

James Gleick book The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

"One God One Religion - Brother Hamza Andreas Tzortzis" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-q-vmmLFat8, Youtube (April 16, 2018) Source: The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

Wisdom, Knowledge

“The key then to attaining this higher level of intelligence is to make our years of study qualitatively rich. We don't simply absorb information - we internalize it and make it our own by finding some way to put this knowledge to practical use.”

Robert Greene book Mastery

Source: Mastery

Way, Intelligence, Knowledge, Study

“Grandfather informs me that is not possible.”

Jonathan Safran Foer (1977) Novelist

“A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: The Art of Travel

Travel, Chance, Time

“The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can't make something out of a little experience, you probably won't be able to make it out of a lot.”

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) American novelist, short story writer

Life, Childhood

“She knows that whispers can be useful. Sometimes they contain real information. But usually they're fairy tales and lies. This is the worst kind of whisper, the kind that draws you in, gives you hope.”

Julianna Baggott book Pure

Source: Pure

Hope, Drawing

“The purposeful destruction of information is the essence of intelligent work.”

Ray Kurzweil (1948) Author, scientist, inventor, and futurist

Source: The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence

Intelligence

“Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

April 18, 1775, p. 258
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol II

Knowledge

“The Net’s interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information, expressing ourselves, and conversing with others. It also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.”

Nicholas Carr (1959) American writer

Source: The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“When I wanted information, it was silent; when I didn't want to hear from it, it got chatty.
It was alost as irritating as Fang.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: The Angel Experiment

“I'm holding back, delaying the information. I'm lingering in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still possible.”

Ian McEwan book Enduring Love

Source: Enduring Love

Time

“Of course, having information to use is one thing. Knowing what it means and how to use it is a different
story.”

Jeff Lindsay book Dearly Devoted Dexter

Source: Dearly Devoted Dexter

“Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature.

Information is control.”

Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking

Source: The Year of Magical Thinking

Literature, Learning, Reading

“Well, all information looks like noise until you break the code.”

Neal Stephenson book Snow Crash

Source: Snow Crash

“The mere imparting of information is not education.”

Carter G. Woodson (1875–1950) African-American historian and writer

Education

“Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?”

Italo Calvino (1923–1985) Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels

Books, Imagination, Reading

“We live in a pretty apathetic age, yet we’re surrounded by an enormous amount of information about other people. If you feel like it, you can easily gather that information about them. Having said that, we still hardly know anything about people.”

Haruki Murakami book Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Source: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

People, Age, Feeling

“… a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention…”

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist

Simon, H. A. (1971) "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World" in: Martin Greenberger, Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, Baltimore. MD: The Johns Hopkins Press. pp. 40–41.
1960s-1970s
Context: In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

Wealth

“When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960) Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Print is predictable and impersonal, conveying information in a mechanical transaction with the reader’s eye. Handwriting, by contrast, resists the eye, reveals its meaning slowly, and is as intimate as skin.”

Ruth Ozeki book A Tale for the Time Being

Source: A Tale for the Time Being

“My idea of good company, Mr. Eliot, is the company of clever, well-informed people who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.”

Jane Austen book Persuasion

Source: Persuasion

People, Idea

“Did you strangle the wolf alpha?" Not that she didn't deserve it.
Curran grimaced. "Of course not. I needed information. After I put her face in my mouth, we agreed that it was in her best interests to tell me what I wanted to know.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Breaks

Wolf

“An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't. It's knowing where to go to find out what you need to know, and it's knowing how to use the information once you get it.”

Anatole France (1844–1924) French writer

The first two sentences of this statement first appear as attributed to France in the 1990s, but the full statement is earlier attributed to William Feather, as quoted in Telephony, Vol. 150 (1956), p. 23 http://books.google.com/books?id=Wm0jAQAAMAAJ&q=%22being+able+to+differentiate+between+what+you+do+know%22&dq=%22being+able+to+differentiate+between+what+you+do+know%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=qYJOU9dAzoXRAYumgcAP&ved=0CMsCEOgBMDQ Misattributed

Education, Memory